It is odd to be sixty years old and to still find a sense of security in things from childhood days. Odder still, the things that might appear on my list of metaphorical comfort blankets. The list includes:

Lemon bonbons are part of my litany of reassurance, things that are remembered when feeling fed up. There was a day I went fishing in the River Cary with the Brooks brothers from down our road. We had stopped at the village shop with the few pennies in our pockets and bought …

My mother was eighty-four yesterday. We had afternoon tea in the back garden of her house. Her two brothers and one of her sisters joined us for the occasion.

The stories were plentiful, there is a great oral tradition in the family and a large number of shared stories. Tales from the past are subject to an immediate peer review, corrections are made, mistakes are revised. Suggestions made after the event are not allowed to alter the recollections of those present.

Memories are not always so easily corrected. Reading an …

On this day in 1964, BBC Television broadcast the very first edition of Play School. The series ran for some 5,000 programmes before being discontinued in 1988. It is astonishing how much of the programme still lingers in the memory. “Here’s a house, here’s a door, windows, one, two, three four. There were the toys and the windows through which the audience were taken, the square window, the round window and the arched window.

Perhaps it is the power of the memories of early childhood that so many of …